


Swish and Flick

by xylaria



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-04
Updated: 2014-05-04
Packaged: 2018-01-21 20:51:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1563611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xylaria/pseuds/xylaria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jemma was always a bit embarrassed by how much the Harry Potter books had influenced her childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swish and Flick

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thinkatory](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinkatory/gifts).



The first Harry Potter book comes out just after Jemma turns ten. She reads it in one night, hiding under the covers of her bed with a torch. The next morning she pulls on a long dress that had been a hand-me-down from her cousin and sneaks into her mother’s bathroom to try and curl her hair. It ends up a frizzy tangled mess that takes her mother an hour to get brushed out that night, but she spends a blissful day sitting under a tree in the back yard with a blanket around her shoulders for a cloak, scratching out her homework using ink from an old printer cartridge and a quill made out of a feather from an Anas platyrhynchos that she had found along the river a few weeks back. 

All during the next year Jemma holds the small, illogical dream in the back of her mind. She imagines getting a Hogwarts letter on her eleventh birthday even as she fills out applications and is accepted to attend a specialized science and maths academy the next year. She even uses her pocket money to buy a real quill and bottle of ink from the paper goods store in town, so she would be comfortable using them just in case. 

She has exams on her eleventh birthday, and fidgets so much that her teacher comes over and asks if she’s okay. When she gets home she races to the table where her mother has set the mail, then forces herself to slow and go through the letters more casually, as if she is just looking for a birthday card from her grandmother. The card is there, but a Hogwarts letter is not and she struggles to hide her disappointment, telling herself that it had been a silly, childish, ridiculous dream and she was eleven now and should be more grown up. That new resolution doesn’t keep her from reading the second book as soon as it comes out, but this time she entertains herself with a detailed analysis of how a person might be turned to apparent stone instead of daydreams of attending Hogwarts the next year. 

Getting the third book is harder. Jemma’s off to her own boarding school now, and while it’s not Hogwarts, she’s found her own version of Ron and Harry in Leo, and they make their own kind of magic in the lab (though their instructors had been slightly less than enthusiastic about their attempt to create floating candles for the dining hall at Halloween.) Jemma considers asking her parents to mail it to her, but she’s afraid they’ll be disappointed that she’s still interested in such a childish book. Then, two days after the book comes out, Jemma walks into the library to discover a copy of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban tucked into the corner of her favorite study cube. The spine has been creased in several places and there is a scuffmark on the cover, but when Jemma opens it up there is no name written inside. Briefly, Jemma thinks of slipping it into her book bag and running up to her favorite spot at the top of the west wing stairwell to read it. She could be done before the owner even realizes it’s gone she thinks. But then reason reasserts itself and Jemma imagines how upset she would be if she lost her book, especially if she hadn’t finished it. She takes it to the front desk and hands it to the librarian, Mrs. Ernst.

“Someone left this in one of the study cubes,” she says, but Mrs. Ernst just shakes her head. 

“That book was left exactly where it needed to be.” Mrs. Ernst says, giving Jemma a wink and going back to checking in a stack of physical chemistry books. The next day a bleary-eyed Jemma leaves the book inside her desk in chemistry class, the one where a second form boy who had worn a Gryffindor pin until he got teased sat during the next class. The next time she checks out a book in the library she tells Mrs. Ernst, “I left the other book where it needed to be, I hope that’s alright.” Mrs. Ernst gives her a big smile and an extra week with the biochemistry book she is checking out. 

By the time the fourth book comes out the books have become popular enough that Jemma has no trouble getting a copy and openly reads it sprawled under a tree on the lawn one sunny weekend. The next term some of the upperclassmen in her new, advanced classes start calling her Hermione, and not in a nice way. Jemma squares her shoulders and keeps her head high and buries herself in her books, but the teasing escalates. When Leo finds her crying in the west wing stairwell one afternoon after someone stole her homework and drew obscene pictures all over her study schedule, he makes her a waterproof, tamperproof book bag with a lock keyed to her fingerprint. 

She misses the release of the fifth book and doesn’t realize that it has come out until a month later when she surfaces at the end of her first year of university. She returns to her dorm room after her last exam to find the book and a note from Leo.

“No studying for next term until you have read this and at least one other book that does not pertain to school work,” it says. 

He then completely ruins the sentiment by asking her advice on his current project. Taking his instructions in order, she reads The Order of the Phoenix immediately and then spends the next two days reading a history of technological development in China, which may be stretching what Leo would consider non-school related but is really quite fascinating and not at all her area of particular interest. When she gets home, she pulls out her old quill and bottle of ink and writes Leo an actual letter about his project, complete with molecular diagrams. He emails her back a brief thanks followed by a long diatribe on the wastefulness and inefficiency of snail mail. 

The sixth book is the only one Jemma gets the day of its release. One of the other students in her lab is a fan, and they put on costumes (Jemma does a much better job at curling her hair this time) and stand in line for hours at the bookstore on campus. They take turns reading out loud to each other as they work in the lab the next day, thankful that it is a Sunday and they do not have to worry about the ribbing of their lab mates. 

Jemma is twenty when the last book comes out. She closes Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows with a satisfying thunk and thinks about the letter sitting on her desk and the matching one she knows Leo received last week and how Hermione had gone from all her book learning to the practical adventures. 

“Do you think it might be time for us to go on our own adventure, Leo?” She asks. Leo looks up from the robot he is fiddling with on the floor, a tiny mechanical spider. 

“Why would we want to go on an adventure?” His expression is genuinely puzzled.

“To put all that we’ve learned to use. To see how what we do impacts the world outside of the lab.” Jemma thinks her words are inadequate to explain her feelings, her desire to not just be the bookworm, the child prodigy, the academic genius. To be something more, though she knows the feeling is both illogical and impossibly vague. 

“I would like to get some field data for these guys,” Leo muses, reaching out to grab an errant spider robot that had started to climb Jemma’s pant leg. 

“Fantastic!” Jemma jumps up, ignoring Leo’s sputtered protests and runs to grab both her and Leo’s letters from their desks. If they want to attend the S.H.I.E.L.D SciTech Academy there is a lot of paperwork to fill out.


End file.
